Each year, Jumpstart sponsors a day for readers all around the globe to join their voices in reading the same book. A different book is chosen each year, and this day has become a day that we love to connect with other schools to read the book together. This year the featured book was Not Norman: A Goldfish Story by Kelly Bennett and illustrated by Noah Z. Jones. Jumpstart puts the book online during Read for the Record so that readers can easily access the book to read aloud. I love having a large full screen version of the book for students to look at while we read alone and with our Skype partners.
Ms. Sandifer’s Kindergarten class started our day by reading the book with me on our projection screen.
I loved hearing the students make noticings about the images that weren’t included in the words. We also had fun making predictions before we turned the pages such as when a tree branch is making a noise outside but we got to guess before we found out. One student thought it would be a zombie!
Next, Ms. Kelly’s Kindergarten class (my daughter’s class) came and connected with Jennifer Reed and her 3rd graders in Newton, MA. We had fun looking at a map before the call and learning that we were connecting with students over 1,000 miles away. Our students also got to introduce themselves to one another.
Jennifer’s students did choral readings of pages, while I read most of our pages with Kindergarten students joining in for words they recognized. Students were amazed that Jennifer Reed and I know each other in real life and will get to see one another at the AASL conference in Columbus this November.
Finally, Ms. Choate’s Kindergarten class came to the library to enjoy a live Google Hangout with Kelly Bennett reading Not Norman and sharing the answers to several questions about being an author and getting ideas for writing.
This was a great addition to the event to allow many classes to enjoy hearing the author. We wish there had been more interaction between students and the author, but it was fun listening in to her voice and ideas.
There’s still time to participate in Read for the Record. You can read the book for free online today and count you and your family in the numbers toward the record.
How do you and your students want to make your mark on the world this school year? International Dot Day, which is September 15ish, is the perfect time to make connections with other schools, spark creativity and collaboration, and see where it takes you for the rest of the year. Whether you’ve celebrated Dot Day from its beginnings or you are just getting started, we invite you to get creative with your students and share that creativity with the world.
From the official page:
“International Dot Day, a global celebration of creativity, courage and collaboration, began when teacher Terry Shay introduced his classroom to Peter H. Reynolds’ book The Dot on September 15, 2009.The Dot is the story of a caring teacher who dares a doubting student to trust in her own abilities by being brave enough to “make her mark”. What begins with a small dot on a piece of paper becomes a breakthrough in confidence and courage, igniting a journey of self-discovery and sharing, which has gone on to inspire countless children and adults around the globe.”
There’s no “right” way to celebrate Dot Day. In fact, every year people around the globe come up with new and creative ways to make dots and connect with others. That’s the magic of this special day.
What happens during a Dot Day connection?
Often, we start by reading The Dot by Peter Reynolds or other dot-inspired books such as Press Here by Herve Tullet. This is done via Skype or Google Hangouts with a connecting class. We begin to connect the dots with one another by learning a bit about one another. Sometimes we create something together. For example, last year students in Barrow Elementary made collaborative digital dots with connecting schools via Google Drawing.
Shannon Miller and John Schu’s Dot Day video is always an inspiration.
Also, check out the Celebridots page for dots created by some of your favorite authors and illustrators.
Many times connecting schools send some of their creations to one another through traditional mail.
How to get started
Register your school on the official Dot Day page. You’ll be added to the global map as well as gain access to the educator guide which is packed with information
Start collaborating with your connecting schools and get ready to make your mark with your students.
Part of making your mark on the world is getting your students’ voices and creations out into the world. As you connect, share your creations on Twitter using #DotDay and #Makeyourmark Consider creating a blog post to show your students’ work to the world.
Our first day of Read Across America and World Read Aloud was filled with wonderful stories and plenty of technical difficulties, but we didn’t let the technical difficulties prevent us from connecting through stories.
The day began with my first cancellation emails. Since World Read Aloud Day is right at the beginning of March, many states are still experiencing winter weather. Two connections were cancelled before we could even begin due to snow. Did this stop us? No. Ms. Wyatt’s 1st grade class still came, and we read aloud Goodnight Already and Waiting Is Not Easy and noticed many similarities between the two books. We just didn’t have a Skype connection to go with it.
Ms. Freeman’s 5th grade students came to connect with Cassandra Ogletree and her students in Forsyth, GA. Before we connected, our students made predictions about where they thought Forsyth, GA was located. Then, we used Google Maps to take a look. During our connection, we read Goodnight Already with Cassandra and her students. I was Bear and Cassandra was Duck. Since our 5th graders are studying perspective, they noticed how the book showed the different perspectives of bear and duck. As usual, students had time to ask one another questions about where they live. We often take for granted that students realize how connected we are around the world, but these Skypes surface that our students have lots of wonderings about the day to day lives of others around the world. When we disconnected, we took time to look at a street view in Google Maps to see the school that we had just Skyped with. Student were amazed by the lack of buildings around the school. It seemed to be way out in the country surrounded by pastures and trees. This is very different from our school that is right next to UGA.
Ms. Boyle’s class skyped with Colleen Friel and her 1st grade in Long Island, NY. We shared The Story of Fish and Snail. Our Skype calls kept freezing or dropping, so we reached a point where we just had to stop the call and finish the story on our own. Once again, the students were so patient during the technical difficulties and we didn’t let it stand in the way of the story.
Ms. Haley’s class had an opportunity to connect with Elizabeth Garton Scanlon, author of wonderful treasures such as All the World and The Good Pie Party. The downside was that we couldn’t get Skype to work at all in order to connect with her. I tried every trick I could think of to make the connection better and faster and nothing worked. Finally, I took out my phone and we huddled around my phone for over 30 minutes listening to her share about her books, her ideas, her dog, and her upcoming work. We had the treat of hearing the first few pagers of her upcoming book The Great Good Summer. Within just a few pages, several of our students started opening up about connections they had to the book. One student shared about losing her dad. Another talked about her dad being gone on tour. I love how stories help us make connections to the emotions we wrestle with and give us a pathway to conversation with one another. It must be amazing as an author to hear how your words open up conversations for readers.
Ms. Freeman’s 5th grade returned at the end of the day to connect again with Colleen Friel in Long Island, NY. This time, our Skype connection was much better since the district worked on the network. We read the book The Day the Crayons Quit. Students loved finding out that even though there were 7 inches of snow on the ground, the New York students were still in school.
Finally, we closed our day by doing a triple Google Hangout with Donna MacDonald in South Burlington, VT and Craig Seasholes in Seattle, WA. Ms. Carney’s Kindergarten class joined their Kindergarten classes in reading 3 Elephant and Piggie stories. It was fun to connect across the country and hear words being spoken between thousands of miles of the United States. We had fun, engaged in some silliness while we read, and made some new friends. Even though Donna had some technical difficulties, we still made it work. We could hear her, but not see her.
I won’t lie that I was a bit flustered today with all of the problems, but I have to say how important it is to persevere. I could have easily given up and called it all off, but we made things work with what we had. Because of that, our students had an amazing first day of connections through stories.
On March 4th, we will celebrate World Read Aloud Day with LitWorld. This special day “calls global attention to the importance of reading aloud and sharing stories”.
For teacher librarians and other educators, it has come to be a week-long celebration of sharing stories through Skype and Google Hangouts. This year, these connections will happen on March 2-6.
Connecting through stories is always such a rewarding experience for our students. Students often discover that we are all very much the same even though we are different.
Shannon McClintock Miller and I invite you to post your schedule to our shared Google Doc and start making connections for this special week. You may even discover a long-time collaborative partner through this one experience.
Be sure to check out the LitWorld site for more information on planning for World Read Aloud Day. They even have a special classroom kit with ideas for schools.
If you are interested in connecting with others on this day, please add your name, schedule, and ideas to the informations in the Google Doc that we started. This will begin to fill up with others around the world as they want to connect their students and schools too. We plan to celebrate throughout the entire week of March 2-6th.
We think it’s important to know that there’s no “right” way to plan for World Read Aloud Day. Whatever you decide to do will be the right plan for your school and your students. Whatever you do, your life will be richly rewarded with the power of spoken word and voices connecting together across the miles to lift up our right to read!
In the words of Kate DiCamillo, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, “Stories Connect Us”. We can’t wait to connect students around the world through story.
Our 2014 Picture Book Smackdown was a huge success. Students in 5 states including Georgia, Texas, Connecticut, Maine, and Pennsylvania shared their favorite picture books along with 2 amazing authors, Dianne de Las Casas and Anne Marie Pace.
Anytime you host an event like this, you worry about technical difficulties. However, today the internet gave us smooth sailing. I do want to take a moment to uncover some of the pieces that went into making this event successful. There was a lot of preparation that went on behind the scenes.
I created our Google Plus Hangout on Air event page well in advance so that we could advertise our smackdown to all of our networks.
All of the authors and participating schools have been communicating with one another via email, twitter, and a shared Google doc. The doc contained tips for making the hangout run smoothly such as keeping our microphones muted unless we were speaking as well as listed the order that we would speak.
All of the participating schools had students prepare in advance. Many of our students wrote our scripts or memorized a brief blurb about their books. Some of us hosted a practice for our students to run through their talks.
We opened the hangout well in advance so that we could test our microphones as needed. I sent everyone a direct link to join the hangout rather than sending everyone a G+ invite.
Many of us had organization to how our students came up to the microphone. For example, I setup my chairs in groups of 3 so that students were already sitting in the groups of 3 that would come up to the microphone.
Some of us had helpers who were assisting us behind the scenes. I recruited a parent volunteer, a UGA student, and UGA teacher to help me. The parent volunteer took pictures and assisted students to the microphone. The UGA teacher created a Google doc of all of the picture books that were shared during the event. The UGA student helped students to the microphone. Since I was in charge of the hangout, I wanted to be able to focus on the technology and supporting any issues that came up with our event.
I have @ilovethisclass creating a list of all of the picture books that are shared during #pbsmkdwn Thank you! On the blog later.
As we had time, we tweet pictures or publicity about the event while it was happening.
I hope that you will take time to listen to the archive because it truly was miraculous. We heard from Dianne de Las Casas about why Picture Book Month was started and it was amazing to see how many authors and illustrators she has recruited to be picture book champions.
We also heard Dianne de Las Casas and Anne Marie Pace share some of their favorite picture books. I wish we could have heard more from them, but they were gracious enough to step aside so that students could voice their love for so many wonderful books.
We heard titles, authors, and summaries. One of my favorite things to hear from students was why picture books matter in our world. To hear their own reasoning about why picture books matter was truly inspiring.
What's better than having an author read her picture book? Listening to it with @barrowmc kids #pbsmkdwn
This will definitely be an annual event for me, and I encourage you to think about how you might host your own event like this to get kids connected and sharing their passions and interests. Happy Picture Book Month!
This year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to collaborate globally. In the past, I’ve participated in amazing events such as Dot Day, Talk Like a Pirate Day, and World Read Aloud Day. Each of those events has connected our students to classrooms and authors around the globe, and I’ve found so many collaborative colleagues through these events. It’s these very events that have pushed me to wonder what more we can do with our students. I’ve been pondering how we can have collaborations that allow our students to make a difference in the world and share their ideas, their questions, their problems, and their solutions.
When our spectrum teacher, Natalie Hicks, came to me with a flyer about America Recycles Day, I knew that this day had potential to spark some action projects with our students and students around the globe. I made a Google doc, crafted a blog post, and started inviting anyone and everyone to connect for America Recycles Day. It didn’t take long for some of the very people I’ve connected with for other events to start posting their own schedules in the doc and making connections. I want to thank Shawna Ford, Jenny Lussier, Cathy Potter, Donna MacDonald, Misti Sikes, Ly Phan, Kathy Schmidt, and Craig Seasholes for taking a risk with me and trying something new. These people put their schedules out there and started making connections.
This week, my own students started making connections for America Recycles Day. Each Skype or Google Hangout offered a little something different.
Ms. Clarke and Ms. Haley’s 3rd grade class connected with Kathy Schmidt and her 3rd graders in Gwinnett County, GA. We learned about how her students are collecting items from home to put in the library’s tinker lab rather than throw them away.
Ms. Wright’s 2nd grade class connected with Cally Flickinger in South Burlington, Vermont. We read the book Here Comes the Garbage Barge by Jonah Winter. The story sparked a great conversation about how our trash can take over our world and how important it is to recycle or reuse instead of throw things away.
Ms. Ramseyer’s 2nd grade class connected with Donna MacDonald in South Burlington, Vermont. Her students shared how they are using Drew Daywalt’s The Day the Crayons Quit to inspire a save the crayons campain. Students are collecting crayons and sending them to be melted into new crayons. Our students took time to offer some other ways that the crayons might be used such as making candles, melting crayons for artwork, fusing crayons together to make two-sided crayons, and investigating what crayons are made of so that they might discover even more things that crayons could make.
I'm amazed at all of the ideas that kids come up with for reusing materials instead of throwing away. #AmericaRecyclesDay@dsmacdonald
Ms. Li’s Kindergarten connected with Misti Sikes and her Kindergarten in Forsyth, Georgia. They shared how they recycle at their school by separating white paper and color paper as well as other ways that recycling has to be prepared before it goes into the bin such as removing paper clips and staples.
Ms. Boyle’s Kindergarten connected with Holly Esterline & Katie LeFrancois’s grade 1 & 2 class in Bolton, Vermont. We shared the book Compost Stew and heard about how their school is doing TerraCycling. Even with our connection issues, we still learned a lot about something we don’t do much of at our school.
@plemmonsa Students want to create TerraCycling video to share with you. Thanks for organizing this! #americarecyclesday
Ms. Tesler’s 4th grade students gathered a lunch bunch together to connect with Cathy Potter and her students in Falmouth, Maine. The 1st graders at her school showed us a Google presentation with pictures of recycling and composting efforts in their school. They have a whole process of how their scraps at lunch get put into a bucket to go to the composting bin.
Finally, Ms. Spurgeon’s 3rd grade class connected with Karre Sloan’s 6th grade students in Nashville, Tennessee. They shared the recycling program from their school and how their 3rd graders are in charge of recycling. They also shared their ideas and tips for our own recycling problem at our school.
In every connection, our students shared our own school problem. We have recycling bins in every classroom, but we are finding that people are still throwing away recyclable things. Even when we recycle, we have an additional problem. People are parking in front of our recycling dumpster and the recycling truck can’t get to the recycling to empty it. We posted these problems onto a Padlet. We showed each connecting class the bins that we have in our classrooms and read the recycling instructions that can be found on the bag inside. Sometimes our connecting classes gave us new ideas right on the spot or shared what their own school is doing that might support our problem. Other classes added to our Padlet after we disconnected. We also added to the Padlet.
Our next step is to take this Padlet and share the ideas with our environmental committee which is chaired by Natalie Hicks. We also have 2 enrichment clusters that we can share the Padlet with. Our hope is that some of the ideas that came from so many perspectives will spark change within our school problem. We want to connect back with some of the classes we met this week and share what we’ve done to improve our problem, and we want to see what they have done since our connection.
I loved that during our very last connection, students arrived in the library to put signs on our recycling bin that were sent by our recycling department.
We saw that we weren’t alone with our problem and that there were multiple things to test out to try to reach a solution.
We learned that recycling is very different from place to place. We are so fortunate in Athens to have a state of the art recycling facility and single stream recycling. Some communities have to put forth a lot of effort to recycle, and it is so easy for us.
We realized that there were so many things we could do with our “recycling” other than put it in the bin. The concept of makerspaces is really causing a lot of us to think about turning trash into functional creations.
We saw that together we could come up with out-of-the-box ideas. We often started with “put up posters about recycling”, but with the energy of collaboration, new ideas surface such as make smaller trash cans, create a recycling contest, write a catchy song about recycling to sing on morning announcements, and more.
My hope is that this week of connections really does spark change in our school and others. At the very least, I think it made us more aware of what we are throwing away. These types of connections have the potential to grow into large-scale collaborations around the globe. The combination of powerful texts such as Here Comes the Garbage Barge and Eyes Wide Open along with the innovative ideas of students, teachers, and families fosters a healthy environment for long-lasting collaboration. Our students are the future of our world, and when we allow them to unite with one another around authentic dilemmas in our world, we are equipping them with problem solving skills to keep our world a peaceful place.
November is Picture Book Month. It’s a time to celebrate the power of picture books and why the matter in our lives no matter what our age. Picture Book Month was started by author Dianne de Las Casas to bring awareness to the role of picture books in our lives. Each year, multiple authors and illustrators contribute daily posts about why they think picture books matter. The Picture Book Month website has a wealth of resources for you to celebrate picture book month with your students, including a calendar, logos, bookmarks, and certificate.
At our school, we host a Picture Book Month Shelf Challenge. Students set their own goal for how many picture books they will read during November. I like allowing students to set their own goal because it allows for differentiation and also allows for surprising goals from students. Each student receives a sheet to document their reading for the month.
At the end of the month, students turn in this sheet. They receive a certificate, a bookmark, and get entered into a drawing to win picture books that I’ve collected for prizes.
For the 2nd year, we will host our annual Picture Book Smackdown. On November 18th from 1:30-2:30PM EST, students in multiple schools across multiple states will gather online with authors in a Google Hangout to share favorite picture books and why they matter in our lives. The event will be a Hangout On Air, so it will also be archived for future enjoyment.
To prepare for the event, I’ve sent a Google form to students to identify students in various grades who want to participate.
As students share their interest, I’m sending them a script to help them prepare for their sharing during the smackdown. They don’t have to use this script, but many find it helpful to remember all of the pieces of sharing. The day before the smackdown, they will gather in the library to do a quick practice.
I hope you will join us on November 18th to watch the smackdown and help spread the word about the event in advance. During the smackdown, students and authors will step to the microphone in their own states and share a favorite picture book. We also hope to capture all of these recommendations in a Google doc.
On November 18th, watch the smackdown with your class or on your own by visiting the event page or watching the stream:
Tweet about the event and your favorite picture books. Even if your class isn’t in the smackdown, they can still share their favorite picture books with the hashtag #pbsmkdwn as well as leave comments for our authors and students. You can also include the picture book month hashtag #picturebookmonth
Many thanks to all of the schools and authors who are participating in the smackdown so far this year:
Participating schools include:
Andy Plemmons, school librarian in Athens, Georgia
Jenny Lussier, school librarian in Durham, Connecticut
Cathy Potter, school librarian in Falmouth, Maine
Kathy Kaldenberg, school librarian in Solon, Iowa
Shawna Ford, school librarian in Weatherford, Texas
Julee Murphy, school librarian in Texas
Christina Brennan, school librarian in Pennsylvania
Participating authors include:
Dianne de Las Casas, founder of picture book month
Anne Marie Pace, author of Vampirina Ballerina
How are you celebrating Picture Book Month? It’s not too late to get a plan together and promote the power of picture books with your students.
On June 25 and 26, 2014 I had the honor of attending the Google Teacher Academy in Atlanta. It was a long road to get to GTA. The application process is a test in how well you can boil down your practice into the most concise wording and video that represents your innovation and reach. The application is short with only a handful of questions that limit your response to 800 characters. One of the most challenging parts of the application process is the video. In one minute, you have to introduce yourself and show how you foster innovation in education as well as how you have a global impact. I don’t even know how many hours it took me to craft a one-minute video, but I do know that the process forced me to really think about my practice. I made multiple versions of the video and got feedback from multiple including Cat Flippen, #GTACHI. Here’s how it turned out:
The wait to find out if I got into GTA was agonizing. I won’t lie about that. Even though I had IFTTT recipes setup to notify when the email came, I still stayed glued to my phone and computer because I was in a professional learning session on announcement day. Once the email came, things started happening fast. The 35 were invited to a Google Plus community where we could begin connecting. It didn’t take long for the collaboration to begin. Here are just a few things that happened:
Jennifer Armstrong began making a Youtube playlist of our GTA videos
I created a Google doc where we could begin crafting a shared blog post that we each could share in our own networks to introduce the 35 #GTAATL participants
Linda Humes and Corey Holmer started designing a t-shirt for us. Corey’s design was ultimately chosen, but many people in the group contributed ideas. Frank LaBanca ordered our shirts and had them all shipped to me in GA so that I could easily drive them to GTA rather than someone having to bring them on the plane
Renee Nolan organized a meetup for most of us on the night before GTA began to get to hangout together before GTA consumed our brains
Janna Gibson made a guide to Atlanta to introduce everyone to the food and sights to check out in Atlanta
And the list goes on
I loved this because it brought out one of the things that inspires me about collaborating. We all have talents and expertise, and so many people stepped up to share their talents and passions with the group.
Finally meeting everyone face to face was so much fun. We only knew one another from our profile pics, social media posts, and blog stories. We all met at Marlow’s for dinner the night before GTA and spent time just having conversation and sharing the anticipation of what the next two days would bring.
We arrived at the Google office and waited until the exact time to enter. After checking in, we were immediately launched into the Google culture, which of course started with food. We had a great breakfast before moving into our agenda.
I won’t detail the entire agenda, but share some of the things that stood out to me along the way.
First, the planning team revamped the entire agenda, and we were the first GTA cohort to try out this new agenda. This was exciting but also a little risky since it meant that we might not experience what we thought we were going to experience. What I saw was that the agenda focused a lot more on philosophy than on specific tools. The idea behind this is that tools come and go and tools change, but if you have an innovative, risk-taking philosophy of teaching, then you adapt to new tools and environments as well as create entirely new environments for you and your students.
We watched the Moonshot Thinking video, which I had seen at a GAFE Summit. It is always powerful no matter how many times I watch it.
I loved how this framed our entire GTA experience because it set the tone that we as innovators in education we need to be trying things that have never been tried and creating new tools and experiences for our students that stretch far beyond a “next step”. I loved how this moonshot thinking and “solving for x” brought us into our first experience at GTA.
This was probably my favorite “activity” that we did over the 2 days. Prior to GTA, each of us submitted what we felt were our biggest challenges in education. Those challenges were compiled into themes. At our tables, we were randomly assigned one of the challenges. Then, one of our team members had to spin a wheel filled with tech tools. Our goal was to use this tech tool to address the specified challenge, and to make things interesting, we only had 5 minutes to make a decision.
My group ended up with “lack of teacher training” paired with “Panoramio“. Most of us in the group had never used Panoramio, which was perfect! I felt like it put us in the shoes of our teachers who feel insecure when facing a new technology tool. I was reminded of teachers who feel frozen when they face the unknown and want someone to just tell them exactly how a tool works before they will try it. With the clock ticking, we didn’t have that luxury. Instead, those of us that had used the tool began brainstorming how Panoramio could address teacher training. Others, like me, frantically researched the tool to see what it was capable of. At a glance, Panoramio is a collection of photographs uploaded by the community of users and embedded onto Google Maps by location. You can browse the photographs by location or you can specifically search for topics of pictures. For me, I was trying to figure out if you could tag images and search by tag. From my own experience, I’ve seen the lightbulb go on so many times for a teacher when they see something put into practice in a classroom. Sometimes all it takes to help a teacher feel “trained” enough to try something is just seeing what it looks like in a classroom. I thought that if we could create a massive social media campaign for educators to upload images of their classrooms into Panormaio and tag those images by the topics that they showcased, then we could support teachers in “seeing” what that specific topic looked like in a classroom. If we needed specific kinds of pictures uploaded to Panoramio, then we could be specific like pictures of students using social media in the classroom. I added this thinking to my group, but I loved that others in my group had completely different ideas for how this tool could be used. This exercise also reminded me that our focus can’t be on the tools. Our focus should be on our students, teacher, families, and community along with the needs that they have. There’s a whole range of tools that can support those needs. If we push our thinking and try something radical, sometimes a tool that seemed like the most absurd idea for solving the challenge actually leads to something innovative.
Our day was of course surrounded by snacks. We had official breaks, but drinks and snacks were always within reach.
Even breaks to the bathroom kept you learning and surrounded by Google culture.
Throughout the 2 days of GTA, there was time for “inspiring ideas”. These were short presentations from various members of GTAATL. We submitted ideas before GTA and were selected by the planning committee to present. I was the very first one to share, which was a bit intimidating. I shared various ways that I empower student voice through Google forms as well as how Google forms can help you crowdsource information.
Other rockstars included Chris Aviles, who shared how he gamifies his classroom. He has created an entire story line that plays out with his students which even includes getting phone calls from game characters using Google Voice. Amy Burvall shared how she used Google Plus to give her students a space to contribute to the classroom and crowdsource information. She also uses this tool to connect people in her professional development sessions. By doing this, people aren’t sitting passively in her sessions, but are instead, actively contributing during her session and beyond. Genius! Hearing from all of these amazing educators during this session was an energy boost during an exhausting day. I was proud to be a part of this group.
One of the things that I hoped would happen was a preview of Google Classroom. We heard about the process it took to develop Google Classroom. I loved seeing a picture from an elementary teacher’s classroom where she had posted about 7 or 8 steps it took to turn in an assignment to the teacher. This was one of the inspirations for Google Classrooms. We had a chance to try out the interface and were all excited and blown away by the usefulness and simplicity. With 35 innovative educators in one room, it didn’t take long for a range of questions to surface. We definitely surfaced some barriers that people may face in using Classroom, but overall the buzz was one of excitement and eagerness to get this tool in our teachers’ hands.
Our lead learners
The rest of GTA involved 4 rounds of explorations of various Google tools and themes. We grouped ourselves into these rounds by common interests in the kinds of challenges we wanted to tackle in our action plans.
We saw a lot of tools, but didn’t have time to use them very much. Now that I’m away from GTA, I’m starting to look at what I saw and consider how these tools fit into what I may try in the library this year. I’m already thinking about how Google Draw can be used as we connect with other schools via Skype and Google Hangout. I wish that we had spent more time with the various map tools from Google because I think there is a lot of potential with those as well for global collaborations. I’ll have to take time to do this for myself.
At the end of day one, we all became Google Certified Teachers. We had a pinning ceremony and a celebration dinner. It was a great sense of accomplishment, but it was only the beginning of the work and opportunities ahead.
Day two was time for us to explore our own interests through an unconference as well as work on our action plans. After GTA, it is an expectation that you create an action plan to facilitate change in education during the coming school year. My focus is on global collaboration. Seeing what students gain from connecting with authors, experts, libraries, and classrooms beyond our walls has convinced me that I need to develop even more opportunities for students to have these connections. This year, I want connecting to be more than a one time thing. I want to create content with students in other states and countries. I want students to offer one another feedback and ask one another questions. I want students to have an opportunity to create projects that matter to them and share those with a global audience.
Amy Burvall inspired many conversations about hashtags and “showing your work”.
I had many important conversations during GTA about this project. Amy Burvall and I talked a lot about hashtags and how tags are the “soul of the Internet”. She helped me to think about how we track our work so that it continues to inform our next work. We talked about the importance of sharing the whole process of a project and not just the final project. This is the kind of thing that GTA does. You may not get to know every single person at GTA, but you make connections with people that you know are going to continue to push your thinking well beyond the 2 days that you spend together.
Now my attention turns to GlobalTL, a Google Plus community that was started by Joyce Valenza. Now, I’m working along with Joyce and many other librarians to develop this community that will facilitate global connections. I know that by connecting and collaborating with librarians, I am connecting my students and teachers with students and teachers around the world. Librarians work with every student, teacher, and family member in the school. I think it makes sense to think about how to create a community that connects people. We don’t know exactly what will happen in the group, but we are going to shoot for the moon to foster global collaboration.
Google Teacher Academy has connected me with 34 other amazing educators, and I know I can call on them for any questions or roadblocks I face. I’m also now connected to a global community of Google Certified Teachers who are actively supporting one another in their educational spaces. I’m sure that GTA is only the beginning of a long collaborative relationship with some amazing global educators.
Each year during national poetry month, we host a live poetry cafe in the library. This event has grown from 1 day to 2 days. It is our way of celebrating National Poem in Your Pocket Day, even though it usually falls on a day other than the national celebration. Across the 2 days, every student in the school comes to the library to read poetry into our open microphone.
The tables are set with tablecloths, lanterns, flowers, and some paper flowers, too.
Each year, we try to add something new. This year, we added some cozy seating among the tables so that students could feel a bit closer to the student reading his or her poem.
This year, we also used a Smore to promote the event and keep everything collected in one spot. The Smore held our schedule, link for logging in to watch the poems, pictures from the event, and links to the videos once they were recorded. I also loved that the analytics in the Smore allowed us to see all of the places that our event was being glanced at.
This year, we also added Twitter to the mix by generating our own hashtag #BarrowPoems
I used Twitterfall to display the tweets coming through, and the students loved seeing each and every one. Sometimes I would take a comment out of the chat and tweet it for visitors who didn’t use Twitter themselves. It was so much fun for the students to know that some of our familiar friends from World Read Aloud Day were watching at times during the day. Okle Miller (Florida) and Donna MacDonald (Vermont) tuned in to listen. We also had a library from Rhode Island join us too.
It was a lot to manage all by myself, but it was fun. It is truly amazing to watch almost every student in the school get up in front of their peers and share poetry. It was also inspiring to watch as students stood with their peers who were nervous about sharing.
I hope that you have a few moments to listen to some of the poetry sessions below and share them with friends, families, and students around the world.
Our two schools are part of a wonderful project called “Banding Together”. In partnership with In This Together Media, the Van Meter third graders kicked this off while working on their Rainbow Loom research projects. After creating so many beautiful bracelets throughout the project, they wanted to do something special with all of these handmade creations. They partnered with In This Together Media to bring these bracelets, happiness, and friendship to children from an orphanage in Mangalore, India. The third graders decided to call the project “Banding Together” and the next step was bringing others onboard to make a difference in the world.
Shannon told Andy about “Banding Together” right away….Van Meter School couldn’t wait for Barrow Elementary to be partners with them too. Together they would bring so much to the children in India….and to each other.
Recently during a Skype planning session, Andy brought up the idea of incorporating poetry into the Banding Together project. It started with a wondering. What if we added short poetry, like a fortune cookie slip, attached to the bracelets? Shannon said, “Let’s go for it.” And the brainstorming began.
We both started thinking of possible titles for the short poetry. We wanted the title to represent the spirit and joy of the Banding Together project. In looking through poets, we thought of Joyce Sidman and her new book, What the Heart Knows: Chants, Charms, & Blessings. In her note to readers, Joyce Sidman writes, “We believe in the power of words themselves. Why else would we pray, sing, or write? Finding phrases to match the emotion inside us still brings an explosive, soaring joy.”
That idea of finding a phrase that matches the emotions in our hearts really connected with what we hoped the Banding Together poetry would represent. Suddenly, we had a thought about our poems. What if we called them “Heart Poems”? They would have a connection to our inspiration from Joyce Sidman’s words. They would represent spreading the joy in our hearts to friends across the miles. They would also be symbolic of the heart charms that we have been creating on our Makerbot 3D printers.
We both reached out to Joyce Sidman to share our ideas and see if she would like to meet our students to kickoff the heart poem project. Not only did she say yes, she pointed us toward a great graphic organizer on her website that would help our students figure out what their heart knows.
Today our students in Athens, Georgia and Van Meter, Iowa came together with Joyce Sidman via Skype. After a quick hello and meeting her dog, she read the poem, “Blessing On the Smell of Dog”. She reminded us that when she is with her dog, she feels like she is home.
This setup the idea that poems come from what he hold in our hearts whether it’s joy, treasures, things we long for, or even what scares us. Joyce spent time walking through each question on the graphic organizer and giving examples of what the question means to her and why it’s important to think about all of these emotions we hold in our hearts, even the feeling of being scared.
She encouraged our students to write from their hearts. She also connected with our Banding Together project. She said, “You’re helping form a bond between you and kids in another part of the world.”
Our students were able to ask her some questions at the end of our Skype. When asked why she writes poetry and not other kinds of writing, Joyce said, “I notice the things that are happening around me and I celebrate them. Poetry allows me to focus on that one thing”.
She also told our students, “Even if there are times when you don’t write, you can always go back to writing from your heart.”
Our students left this experience eager to begin writing heart poems to attach to our Rainbow Loom bracelets. They will fill out the graphic organizer and then submit their poems using a google form.
Students can quickly get to this form from Symbaloo or by scanning this QR code.
Poems will go into a spreadsheet when they are submitted which will allow us to easily print them and attach to our bracelets.
We invite you to join us by submitting your own heart poems. Use Joyce Sidman’s great graphic organizer and have your students submit their poems in our Google form. We’ll attach them to bracelets that we have as well as share them with other special friends in coming months. You can also use the hashtag #heartpoems to share some of your poems on Twitter.
Thank you, Joyce Sidman, for inspiring this special addition to the Banding Together project, and thank you for taking time to connect with our students.
Expect the Miraculous 